Looters pillage Iraq's 'sea of antiquities'

Chicago Tribune

Published Wednesday, March 28, 2007

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Four years after the looting of the Iraqi National Museum during the fall of Baghdad, frustrated antiquities experts say untold thousands of Mesopotamian artifacts have been stolen from other vulnerable historical sites across the nation.

Though the museum is now safe -- its doors bricked shut and collections entombed behind welded cellar doors -- the country's 12,000 archeological sites are mostly unprotected and the Iraqi government is hard put to stop their plunder.

The longtime former director of the state board of antiquities fled to the United States last August after receiving a death threat. Car bombings and other violence mean the guards who would look after remote sites are often unable to get there.

Concerned and unable to get into the country, Mesopotamia scholars from around the world have been forced to rely on satellite images that show the cratered landscape left by thieves at southern Iraqi sites where important cities once stood nearly 2,000 years ago.

The images show holes as small as a few feet in diameter spreading across sites throughout the autumn of 2003, a pattern that continued in some places through 2005. The destruction appeared to slow in the last satellite photos available in early 2006, but the impact of the damage is clear. "We're losing an enormous amount," said anthropologist Elizabeth Stone of the State University of New York-Stony Brook, who has studied the satellite imagery. "We look at the sites and say there have to be thousands of objects taken. Perhaps tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of objects."

So far, the loot hasn't appeared in art galleries or on the black market in anything like the volume in which it appears to have been taken -- leaving open the question of where the stolen antiquities have gone.

"Most agree that the bulk of it is in storage somewhere, for whatever reasons," Stone said. "But that it's been taken is pretty clear. Somewhere there are a lot of warehouses bulging at the seams."

The physical extent of Iraq's archeological history is enormous, encompassing artifacts at thousands of sites. Evidence going back 11,000 years traces mankind's earliest farming villages here through the evolution of cities, the invention of the wheel, creation of writing, and codes of law.

The sites are so rich that one of Stone's research teams uncovered 20,000 ceramic objects at one site in just a few months before the war. In clay pots stuffed like safety deposit boxes, they found wills, lists of who lived in houses, their friends, business dealings -- almost everything to do with daily Mesopotamian society.

"When you go anyplace and put your finger in the soil, you will find one of two seas," said former Iraq Minister of Culture Mufeed Mohammed Jawad al-Jaza'iri. "A sea of oil, or a sea of antiquities. Sometimes, you can find them together."

Soon after the invasion, it required the equivalent of a military expedition to cross the few blocks from the Green Zone to the Iraqi National Museum, said Minneapolis Institute of Arts curator Corine Wegener, an Army reservist tasked by the U.S. military with recovering looted artifacts in Baghdad in 2003.

"I used to drive there in a two-vehicle convoy with a nine millimeter (pistol) in my pocket," she said. "You can't do that anymore. It just kind of steadily got worse."